Current Exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Peterborough

Grand Theft Terra Firma: David Campion and Sandra Shields

Produced and circulated by The Reach Gallery Museum Abbotsford | Curated by Laura Schneider
On view until June 23

Get There From Here: Nicole Bauberger

On view until June 2

Opening Reception for Grand Theft Terra Firma. Photo by Matthew Hayes.

Grand Theft Terra Firma: David Campion and Sandra Shields

Grand Theft Terra Firma tackles settler responsibility head-on. David Campion and Sandra Shields disrupt the celebratory mythology of nation building by reframing the settlement of the Canada as a complex heist masterminded by criminals in London and played out on the ground by a gang of greedy thieves. Combining photography and installation, and developed in collaboration with many partners from Stó:lō community, Grand Theft blends popular culture with original source material to consider Canada’s colonial history within the particularities of local experiences in S’olh Temexw, now more commonly known as BC’s Fraser Valley.

The project employs an “unsettling” strategy to explore Canada’s difficult past and our inheritance of its injustices. Blending fictional characters with elements drawn from historical record, the artists create a space where audiences are asked to consider their own relationship to destructive colonial practices. The exhibition supports discussion around emergent notions of personal awareness and responsibility in the process of decolonization, underscoring the possibility for art to participate in the critical discourse on social reconciliation in divided societies.

Fraser Valley artists David Campion and Sandra Shields create photo-text installations, often around the theme of power and its blind spots. Their early work combined literary nonfiction and documentary photography, resulting in three books. For the past decade, they have focused on public art, creating installations that deploy alternative strategies to package words and photographs as a means of disruption. Sandra comes to the subject of colonization as the great-granddaughter of early Alberta settlers. David approaches from the vantage of a British immigrant who grew up in southern Africa during the era that saw colonial governments fall. This exhibition will be on view until June 23.

Opening Reception for Get There From Here. Photo by Matthew Hayes.

Get There From Here: Nicole Bauberger

To create this series (2008 – ongoing), Bauberger has driven across Canada, from Cape Spear, Newfoundland to Vancouver, British Columbia to Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories, stopping at the side of the road to paint a one-foot-square landscape from the back of her truck. Determining the intervals by kilometers traveled rather than by points of inspiration, Bauberger captures the mundane yet familiar stretches of roadway between urban centres, those “nameless places where people seldom stop,” and thus charts the veins and arteries across our vast and changing landscape. Understanding our roadways as the “largest cultural artifact that we produce as a nation,” Get There From Here catalogues our collective experiences traversing long stretches towards our objective, familiar or new. This body of work resides at the overlapping of en plein air painting, travel, and roadwork. Each stop is a practice of taking care; spending time to check in along the way, and intimately connect with and draw attention to the ubiquitous yet ignored destinations between. This exhibition will be on view until June 2.

Nicole Bauberger is an artist of settler ancestry who – when not on the road – lives and works in Whitehorse, Yukon. She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions in the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec. Her work resides in public collections across Canada and in many private collections across Canada, the US, Europe and Australia. With a BA from Trent University, and a diploma in Northern Studies from Yukon College, Bauberger has received training in fine art and art history from the Ontario College of Art + Design and Athabasca University, through a five-year apprenticeship with Ontario painter David Bierk, through a Northern Residents’ Research Award from the Association of Canadian Universities for Northern Studies, as well as with Kwanlin Dun First Nation Elders Mrs. Annie Smith and her daughter Ms. Dianne Smith.